


Raison D'être

by pessimisticvirtuoso



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Brief suicidal ideation, Don’t copy to another site, Ill update these as I think of more, Self-Reflection, So literally everything that comes with that, Stangst, The Stans through different ages, i cant think of any more tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 23:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20218165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pessimisticvirtuoso/pseuds/pessimisticvirtuoso
Summary: Everybody has a goal of some sort. Stan and Ford's goal was to go sailing when they were kids, to find treasure and new lands.Life tends to put a wrench into plans.





	Raison D'être

At age eight, Stan and Ford both dream of sailing across the world on the Stan O'War. They needed nobody but their other half, and not a living soul could hold them back. For them, it would be treasure and girls all year round, and they would finally be able to live freely. There would be no pressure from other people, nobody telling Stan that he had to clean his room and make better grades, and nobody to tell Ford that he shouldn't be spending so much time outside instead of studying. There would be no rules, no limitations, just a set of twins out on the ocean.

Things change.

-=oOo=-

At age fifteen, Stan still dreams of sailing, but also dreams of becoming a professional boxer, or even a football player. If he were honest, he couldn't care less about what he ended up doing with his life, as long as he had his brother with him. He and his twin were inseparable, and Stan could only hope that it would remain that way forever. Without his best friend, who was he? What did he have to offer?

Ford had stopped seeing the potential in sailing, not to mention that the plan had no practicality in the first place. How would they get money, make a living? He hasn't voiced this to his brother and doubted that he ever would. Instead, secretly, Ford began dreaming of colleges and universities. He began dreaming about a more likely future than treasure hunting with his brother. He felt guilty about it, but even Stanley had to see how difficult something like that would be, right? Didn't Stanley feel suffocated, too? This was normal, right? Right?

-=oOo=-

At age eighteen, Stan dreams of making millions, muttering how he'll show them, they'll regret it. That night he dreams of striking gold on the beach, and his first thought is to go tell Ford. He wakes up at three in the morning with the image of his brother's heartbroken expression searing into his memory.

The older sibling no longer dreamed of a bright future, instead thinking of what could have been. What could he have accomplished had <strike>his brother</strike> Stanley left well enough alone? What sorts of equipment would have been available? What great minds could he have shaken hands with? Would he have finally been accepted as a person, rather than some freakish mutant? 

He wouldn't ever know, and that night Ford dreamed of nothing because he didn't sleep.

-=oOo=-

At age twenty-three, he was homeless, and the only thing he could think about was where he would get his income from. Stan didn't dare dream of anything past a bed and a warm meal. He knew that at this point in his life, his dreams with Ford were dead and gone, if they had ever really existed in the first place. Sometimes, before he could catch himself, he found that his thoughts drifted back to when times were easier, when he didn't have to worry about basic survival instincts. He missed it.

His counterpart, miles and miles away, was absorbed in the mysteries and excitement that only Gravity Falls could offer him. Every day there was a new discovery, a new anomaly, a new piece in the puzzle that he was desperate to solve. The rush he got from every new piece of information never waned, and his hunger for knowledge only grew. He vaguely wondered when there would be nothing left to see, yet he doubted that day would ever come.

-=oOo=-

At age twenty-eight, <strike>Stanley</strike> Andrew was on the run, trying to lay low. Rico was looking for money that he didn't have, his gas tank was half-full at best, and he was running out of places to hide. He sometimes dreamed of having a sturdy home, or going back in time to stop himself from getting tangled up in this mess. 

He would never admit it, but he also dreamed of not waking up again. 

One day, a postcard slid through the door of his motel room, and he dreamed of a happy reunion.

Stanford didn't dare fall asleep, much less dream. How could he, when triangles haunted him every time he closed his eyes? Everything was crumbling around him, nothing made sense anymore. He forgot about the postcard entirely. He forgot about Stanley entirely. He greeted the knock on the door with a crossbow.

That day, their lives were changed again, irreparably gouging a rift between the set of twins.

-=oOo=-

At age thirty-five, Stanley Pines was legally dead, and the newly-renamed Mystery Shack was really starting to pick up interest. Word had spread like wildfire, at this rate he might just be running a bona fide tourist trap. To everyone in Gravity Falls, Stanford Pines had stopped being the creepy scientist in the woods and started being someone well-known. How he was well-known wasn't something he was necessarily proud of, but something he was used to doing. 

He hated that his name was stolen. Stan had already ruined his twin's life, he didn't need to besmirch his name as well. 

Ford didn't have time for something as trivial as dreaming, literally or metaphorically. Every second seemed to be a race for his own survival, an active fight against nearly everything. Some dimensions seemed so close to his own that it tore him apart, and just for a second or two, he allowed himself to feel something other than the desperate, animalistic instinct to run, hide, protect himself. In those handfuls of seconds, he felt human again. He felt anger, grief, anxiety, listlessness. 

Each time, he reigned himself in so quickly that it seemed like the moment simply hadn't occurred, and kept going.

-=oOo=-

Eight years later, Stan was drunk and alone, hating the world, but hating himself more. Where were the other two journals? Why couldn't he just get his shit together already? Was Ford... was he even alive anymore? What was the point? Why would he even try anymore? It's been fifteen years, and he still hasn't made any progress worth mentioning. What he's done in the past decade and a half is equivalent to what his brother could've done in a week. It was useless, he wasn't going to get his brother back in his lifetime. He wasn't smart enough or good enough. 

Maybe he should give up. 

The elder Pines had long ago fallen into the same routine of survival. Days and nights meant nothing to him anymore, just a constant haze of paranoia, which had served him well, and had saved his life several times over. He slept wherever he could, snatching bits of rest in a secluded cave or in an abandoned shelter of some sort. He didn't know what month it would be in his home dimension, nor did he know his exact age. His best guess was his late thirties, but he found that he didn't necessarily care for something as trivial as his age when he was being hunted. This was his life now. Ford would never see his house in the woods of Gravity Falls again. He would die in a different dimension, and that knowledge was hard to accept at first. Now, though, it was just another thing that weighed on him.

-=oOo=-

He had tried to give up. He really had. He went three years giving all his effort towards living a <strike>stolen</strike> normal life, trying to forget about what laid beyond the vending machine, trying to forget about the portal, trying to forget about his other half. He covered up Ford's old bedroom, that strangely lacked an actual bed, and had long ago taken to sleeping in the guest room. He smiled extra widely, extra bright for the customers, which only served to make his frowns at night deeper. At age forty-six, though, he couldn't help himself. Despite his mind screaming at him to _stop, it was no use_, he got out of bed one night and ventured down into the basement. 

The dusty room greeted him with the same wet-earthy smell that it had always had, and Stanley felt run-down and tired. Determination burned quietly inside of him, however, and that night was the first of many more spent the same way- burning the candle at both ends, hoping against hope that he would see his brother again someday.

Stanford was buzzing with a type of excitement that he hadn't felt in years, not since he first started living in Gravity Falls. It was dampened by the grimness that had resulted from this new lifestyle, as well as the underlying reason behind the discovery, but nevertheless, he had found that it was nice to be amped up about something. 

The blueprints that this alternate Fiddleford had laid out before him was something that only a true genius could draw up- someone far smarter and more capable than he. The parts needed would be hard to find, even harder to obtain, and the mechanics of the thing was nearly impossible. Alt-Fiddleford assured him that it could be done, but would only work if it was constructed exactly as the blueprints said. 

Before him laid the blueprints for the earliest version of the Quantum Destabilizer. If this worked, he would only have one shot, one chance, but that chance was a risk he had to take. This would bring about the end of Bill Cipher, he was sure of it.

-=oOo=-

Dipper and Mabel were sharper kids than he had expected. That much was prevalent within the first two weeks of their visit. But now, as he stood in the basement of <strike>his brother's</strike> his house, the portal he had worked on for thirty long years finally powered up, he cursed himself for underestimating anyone related to Shermie and Ford. 

There wasn't much he could do besides hope that these people, who had unexpectedly wormed their way into his heart, would believe him. 

When it all was said and done, and he was staring his long lost brother dead in the face, he couldn't help himself- he dreamed of having a complete family. 

Ford had gotten an unsuspecting Bill _right in his sights_, his finger tensing around the trigger, when the portal opened behind him. This wasn't like any other portal he'd encountered during his travels. This one called to him, made him lower his gun and sneak away undetected. Most rifts between dimensions glowed purple, green, pink, white, or even inky black, but this one was blue, a shade of blue that he never thought he'd see again. Electricity tingled across his body as he stepped through, and at age fifty-eight, he was home.

At the end of the day, Ford found that being home was the dream that he no longer realized he'd had until it was fulfilled. Laying on a cot in his old lab, though, he realized he felt no different. Being in his home dimension was familiar, but in a sickening way. What proved to him that this wasn't some sort of alternate reality conjured by Bill? What proved this wasn't a false reality of his own making? He's dreamed of being here before.

-=oOo=-

In the past forty years, both twins grew familiar with the feeling of fear, albeit for very different reasons. Each one had skeletons in their closet, things they weren't proud of doing and things that haunted them. As vastly different as their lives were, they both were overwhelmed with fear for the lives of their great-niece-and-nephew. They felt their own brand of guilt due to the situation. As they sat, defeated and sharing a canteen of liquor, Ford couldn’t think of anything being worse than this. He had come to care for those two kids as much as he had come to care for Stanley again, and he couldn’t bear to have them in danger because of his foolish actions.

His brother, however, was scheming. If he could pull this off, then it would be the biggest con he’d ever pulled and this whole situation would be over.

-=oOo=-

When it was all said and done, Stan couldn’t dream about anything. Who was he? Why was he in a forest? A small girl ran up to him and the older man over there regarded him as a hero, but he didn’t understand. He was no hero. He didn’t remember anything.

Everybody else grieved for a loved one lost, for the memories they had with him becoming one-sided. They grieved for the death of Stanley Pines, in nearly every way but physical. Each person blamed themselves for something different, because they couldn’t bear to blame anyone else. 

Ford blamed himself more than anybody else did. He had made many, many mistakes in his lifetime, and they resulted in him losing his brother for the third time. How selfish could he be, even when he was making an effort not to be?

He dreamed of getting his brother back and making everything up to him, but he squashed it back down immediately. It wouldn’t do to think so optimistically, to think that he still had a chance to make things right. His baby brother was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> This is for August Writer's Month, and the prompt was 'dreams', but honestly I'm not going to go through the struggle to tag anything. I just thought this would be fun!


End file.
